Laura Cappello moonlights as Patsy Cline

By Ann Wood Banner Correspondent

Friday

Nov 30, 2018 at 2:54 PMNov 30, 2018 at 2:54 PM

If you want to follow in the footsteps of country music star Patsy Cline, you can head down to Winchester, Va. It’s there that Virginia Patterson Hensley was born on Sept. 8, 1932, and raised in nearby Gore. The website patsycline.com lists her Winchester house at 608 South Kent St. as a must-see, and reveals that she attended nearby Handley High School, that she worked behind the soda fountain at Gaunt’s Drug Store, performed on WINC Radio and that the home at which she and second husband Charlie Dick married (on Sept. 15, 1957) was at 720 South Kent St.

If you’re not hankering to travel that far, but need a fan-sized dose of Patsy Cline, Wellfleet’s own Laura Cappello stars as the country music icon in “Always…Patsy Cline,” a musical memoir written by Ted Swidley and directed here at the Provincetown Theater by artistic director David Drake. It includes 27 songs, for which Cappello will be accompanied by musical director-pianist John Thomas, bassist Trevor Pearson, drummer Luke Massough and guitarist Dick Stocks. The show, which Cappello says begins in 1957 and ends with Cline’s untimely death in a plane crash (she was 30 years old) in 1963, is told from the point of view of her friend, Houston housewife Louise Seger, who is played by Julia Salinger. Performances begin on Thursday, Nov. 29, and will run for three weekends (7 p.m. on Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. on Sunday) through Dec. 16.

“I really wanted to do this show — I saw it out in Arizona during my honeymoon and really wanted to bring it to the Cape,” Cappello says, and so she has, in productions that date back to 2002. Though she wasn’t as obsessed with Cline as some the star’s followers, notably Louise Segers in the show itself, “I was certainly a fan of 1950s music, including Patsy Cline.”

It’s been said that little Patsy began entertaining neighbors when she was just three years old, but her big break famously came in 1957 when she was the winner on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” on CBS-TV, singing “Walkin’ After Midnight,” which was subsequently rush-released as a single and then rocketed up the charts. Cline was on her way to country music superstardom. In 1959 she got a new manager and in 1960 a new label, Decca. She joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry. In 1961, she released her second major hit, “I Fall to Pieces.” She was injured in a car crash later that year, and as soon as she recovered, recorded “Crazy,” written by Willie Nelson, which became her signature song. That was followed by “She’s Got You” in 1962 and that fatal plane flight in 1963.

“Always… Patsy Cline” is based on a real relationship, Cappello says. “Patsy was a big letter writer,” and she met up after a gig with one correspondent, admirer Louise Seger, “and ended up going back to her house for bacon and eggs after the show.” The friends kept in touch through letters, from which the musical is told.

Cappello, a Chatham native and a dental hygienist, says that she didn’t start acting until she was in her 20s. She was bored one day, and her mother suggested that she audition at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans.

“Then I was hooked,” she says. “I didn’t even know I could sing.” She most recently acted in “You Can’t Take It With You” at the Provincetown Theater (along with Salinger).

Though Cappello has been playing Cline for years, she’s not over it yet, by any means. “Each production is different,” she says, “and I love doing it. I think mainly because the audience enjoys seeing the show, so that’s a good feeling. I like to please the people… I just like that Patsy came from a small town and found her voice and juggled marriage and children and her career, her love of singing, and she was able to pull it off.”